On journalism, reporting, and reading
From the LA Times (via Terry Heaton):
Stories have never arrived to the world fully formed or vetted. Journalists have generally had hours — not minutes or seconds — to craft a story from the blast wave of facts and factoids that comes in the wake of a bombshell.
What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process — reporting — as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.
As Perry de Havilland has been fond of saying for more than half a decade now, blogs will certainly have an effect on how the news is reported, but the most important change will be in how people read the news.
Filed under: Life
I think I’d have to disagree somewhat with the LA Times story. The process may be a hybrid of the traditional reporting process, but not at all the same process we are seeing. In the time between event and report the reporter actually went about refining and gaining accuracy before publication with a low rate of correction and a high rate of additional new information. The new model is a belch of information followed by a series of apologies with less truly valuable additional information forthcoming as new (other) events vie for airtime and push the older discarded information from the stage.
I don’t think the LA Times was claiming that reporting hasn’t changed since before the internet.